Jeff Ballweg

A common trick from mid-90s web development was to add a tag like: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords, my, site”/>. Known as the “meta keywords” or just simply “keywords” it was often heavily loaded with terms customers would be searching for, and the theory was that the more you had, the better your ranking on Google. The belief was that Google and other search engines used this tag to get an idea about your site’s content, and so it was common for people to build sites with hundreds of different keywords. Many sites would even use their competitors name to drive traffic to their site, sometimes causing angry responses when discovered.

People who work in web development have known for quite some time that the effectiveness of this practice has diminished over the last several years, especially with Google. We’ve found that there is more weight given to the use of a keyword within a page, the page’s title, a link to the site containing the term, the proximity of that word to other search terms and any highlighting of the term by bold or italicized type.Basically, great content drives results better than behind-the-scenes trickery, which leads the SEO set to fall back on the common phrase “Content is King.” The theory applies broadly to a company’s message, with the general idea being that despite anyone’s best efforts to trick the search engines into loving your website, your energies are probably better spent creating quality material for it. Not only are you likely to create better search results and more relevant (if not greater numbers of) hits, but you’ll see better sales when you give your visitorsaccurate information about your company and the products you provide. Recall that the reason we build websites is to sell products and services, not just create arbitrary hits.

Of course webmasters, who regularly promote themselves on their ability to get a website highly ranked on a search engine, and getting to the top of Google for a specific search term is most client’s top request. While a lot of promises are made, the reality is that Google’s famous algorithm changes regularly and web developers need to keep up to date with the latest techniques in garnering attention from the almighty Google. The games we used to play with keywords, meta tags, and hidden strings of text are less effective today than they once were, and some of those techniques can actually make your rank worse. In fact today, in a rare official statement about how their algorithm works, Matt Cutts from Google explains that they don’t use the meta keywords at all. Basically, they were too prone to abuse, and since the actual content of a website is what people are looking for anyway, it makes sense to use only human readable text to shape results.

For the small business website that means careful copywriting, carefully choosing the title of each page, and selecting key text to put in bold or italics. More than anything else, Google’s picture of your website is going to be formed by the text on the page more than any other element of the design. Photos, videos and graphics are absolutely necessary to entice the human user once they’re on the site, but for now at least, Google sees your website in text-only mode.

Wordle's Visualisation of this Post

So one should be aware of the picture Google is getting of your website from the text you provide. If you’re visual like I am, you can use a tool like Wordle to get a feel for how your website looks to a search engine, in terms of keyword density, which is another metric SEO gurus like to argue about. You want to make sure that what you’re writing accurately reflects the message that you are trying to send. You want to verify that your writing reflects all the services that you offer, and make sure there isn’t too much overlap between the pages within your site. At the same time you need to be mindful that your copy is most of all there to entice individual human readers to buy your products. Converting Google searches to hits is just the first step, our ultimate goal is to turn hits into sales; so remember that a jumbled mess of keywords may make it to the top of Yahoo, but users will quickly bounce off your home page when they can’t find what they’re looking for. So don’t get carried away or swear off pronouns for the sake of keyword loading to pump up the density, as it turns off users, and creating a suspiciously high keyword density might even turn off the search bots.

Remember that to improve search ranking, we strive to improve the breadth and depth of information on each of our pages, so its more important to highlight key text, and write concise, relevant titles, and not rely on tricks like we used to do with meta tags and keyword loading. Essentially we’re trying to create a website that is a wealth of information about the business, product, or service that it’s dedicated to. Which means we’re not really gaming search rank on Google so much as Google is teaching us to build high-quality websites full of relevant information.